Rainy day in Portimao

The ING Renault F1 Team prepares to wrap up its first week of testing in the Algarve as Fernando Alonso remains in the R29.

I'm sorry to say that the rain has returned. The sky is grey, the track is absolutely soaked and it doesn't look like it's going to clear up any time soon. It could therefore be another frustrating day at the Algarve Motor Park - this is the third wet day out of four, but it's the same for all the other teams here.

Fernando had his first taste of the R29 yesterday as he clocked up 86 laps. The engineers were relieved to finally get some dry running in and managed to tick off a lot of the items that needed doing at this test. Fernando too seemed pleased with his first day and in the car and explained that he was learning about the car and improving with every lap. It's still very early days but Fernando's dry running gave the engineers lots of valuable data which they went over last night.

Because it looks like remaining wet here, we will be limited with what we can do today. As I explained earlier in the week, the wet conditions really restrict what you can learn as you cannot really complete valid set-up or balance work - certainly not with the amount of water we have on the track at the moment. So we can check the systems on the car and add mileage to the new parts, but the team will be cautious about doing too much in the wet as we don't want to risk damaging the car. So let's keep our fingers crossed that the weather will improve later in the day!

As usual I will post times around lunchtime and at the end of the session.


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